A study by Alex de Vries-Gao from the VU Amsterdam Institute for Environmental Studies indicates that global AI power demand could hit 23GW, while also consuming 312.5 to 764.6 billion liters of water this year. According to The Verge, this is greater than the amount of power Bitcoin mining used in all of 2024, while consuming about the same volume that the entire world consumes in bottled water in a year.
Although these numbers might seem massive, these are still conservative estimates, especially as big tech companies do not break down the numbers in their annual sustainability reports to show the actual consumption of their AI operations. “There’s no way to put an extremely accurate number on this, but it’s going to be really big regardless,” Alex de Vries-Gao told The Verge. “In the end, everyone is paying the price for this.”
So, to get these values, De Vries-Gao used estimates from analysts and matched them with data from earnings calls and other publicly available information to extrapolate how much AI hardware these companies have deployed, as well as their energy usage. With that value, he then estimated that these AI systems produced between 32.6 and 79.7 million tons of carbon dioxide annually, or about 56 million tons on average — by comparison, Singapore’s greenhouse gas emissions sit at just 53 million tons in 2022.
Professor Shaolei Ren of the University of California, Riverside, even said to the publication that De Vries-Gao’s numbers could be understated, especially as it only considers the actual operations. These assumptions could substantially increase once we consider the environmental impact of the entire supply chain — from mining to fabrication, deployment, and the eventual disposal of the billions of AI chips being used in today’s race.
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